Electronic systems and circuits have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems have facilitated increased productivity and reduced costs in analyzing and communicating data, ideas and trends in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Electronic systems designed to provide these benefits often include integrated circuits on a single substrate that provide a variety advantages over discrete component circuits. However, traditional design and manufacturing approaches for integrated circuits are often very complex and consume significant resources.
Traditionally electronic components were custom designed for a relatively narrow range of applications with a fixed combination of required peripheral functionalities. Developing custom component designs with particular fixed peripherals is time and resource intensive. Even if a component may suffice for more than one application, determining which one of the different available particular microcontroller designs is best suited for a particular application is challenging. In addition, the unique aspects of the intended application often make it difficult to find an optimum component, usually necessitating a compromise between the convenience of using an existing component design and less than optimum performance. For a number of conventional approaches, when a suitable component is found, subsequent changes to the application and new requirements placed on the application can lead to the need for a totally different traditional component.
Traditional components that attempt to provide some flexibility can be problematic because they tend to require a sophisticated amount of design expertise and the obstacles of long development times and high costs still remain. To the extent some flexibility may be provided by the inclusion of gate arrays or other logic devices, the traditional approaches remain expensive and require a sophisticated level of design expertise. In addition traditional integrated circuit configurations and functionality are typically set during initial manufacture and are not readily adaptable to changing conditions in the field.
In addition to complexity and sophisticated design procedures, real time monitoring and/or control of operating components can be challenging. Traditional monitoring and/or control of integrated circuits typically involves complex interactions with complicated command structures and syntaxes that are not readily comprehendible or user friendly. Recognizing alterations in convoluted expressions of operating states, evaluating implications of the alterations and/or reacting to the evaluation appropriately using elaborate command and data input mechanisms with sufficient speed to be useful in real time is particularly difficult.